This is a holy day. Some churches call it “Stewardship Sunday,” others “Pledge Day” or “Pledge Sunday.” I’ve even heard it called “Loyalty Sunday,” which I think is a terrible idea: it sounds too much like a loyalty oath, something you might sign for a repressive government, like in Nazi Germany or something. That’s why I’m glad we call it “Consecration Sunday,” because it is very descriptive: it refers to the act of consecrating our pledges for the upcoming year. And I don’t have to go into the reason for pledging, do I? I mean, we’re all adults here, we all know that it takes money to keep this place running, to keep the heat on and the lights . . . And we all know that although inflation has been pretty flat lately, it does go up a couple of points every year, and that are expenses are not exempt from that . . . No, we’re all adults, and as Garrison Keillor might have it, above average, and so we all understand the need, and why we need to talk about money at least once a year . . .
So this year, I thought we’d take a look at
the verb “to consecrate,” which, of course, the act of consecration comes from:
just what does it mean to consecrate
something, and why do we use it to describe what we are doing here? Well, look at the word itself: “con,” or
associate with, and “secrate,” from the word “sacred”. To associate with the sacred.
Now, that’s all well and good, and everything,
but what does it mean to be
associated with the sacred? And being a
child of the Internet age, the first place I looked—just to get a feel for what
the word means, of course—was Google.
And I was heartened that one of the first hits, the first results, was
“Consecration Beer.” Intrigued—in a
purely academic way, of course—I clicked on the link and up popped a
description: “Dark ale aged in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels from local wineries .
. . Rich flavor of chocolate truffles, spice, tobacco, currants, and a bit of
Cabernet. Very full bodied, sip
slowly.” And my first thought was “Sip
slowly, I’ll just bet: full bodied is
obviously an euphemism for ‘highly alcoholic’,” but my second thought was “All right—the
Holy Grail of preaching! A modern,
illustration of the central concept of my sermon. What deep, theological reason does the Russian
River Brewing Company have for naming this brew ‘Concentration,’ and how can I
use it in a pithy—yet humorous— ay to illuminate my central point?”
But when I looked into it further, I found
that the brewery had beers called “Redemption,” “Benediction,” and (of course)
“Temptation,” and that in fact most of
their beers have theologically-inspired names.
Apparently, the brewmaster has a fetish for theology; perhaps he’s a
disgraced seminarian, or something. “Rats,”
I thought, and looked in a more traditional place: the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and here’s what it says: “to officially
make (something, such as a place or a building) holy through a special
religious ceremony.” And I like that definition,
the idea of making something holy, except for one thing: the word holy, which
is kind of a hot-button word . . . normally, as it says in the hymn “only thou art holy,” with the “thou” being,
of course, God. So to think of making
something holy through a religious ceremony, designed by us Human Being types
sounds a little, well, theologically incorrect.
Remember: we’ve talked a lot lately about the worship God likes, and it
isn’t necessarily pomp or even circumstance.
So I thought I’d look up another definition,
this time in the plain, old Webster Dictionary—maybe it was that newcomer
Merriam that messed things up—and it says “to make or declare to be sacred; to
appropriate to sacred uses; to set apart, dedicate, or devote to the service or
worship of God.” Well, there it is, I
thought, the third one: to set apart,
dedicate, or devote to the service or worship of God. None of this “making holy” stuff, none of
this usurping of God’s role, trying to do the job of the Lord.
Until, of course, I looked again in Webster’s, and found the
definition of “holy” to be “set apart to the service and worship of God,” and
threw up my hands. I had to admit
it: when we consecrate something, we are
making it holy, we are setting it aside for the service or worship of God. And it makes sense, in a way. In a way, we are doing just what we do in our
sacraments, in baptism or communion. We
believe that it is God who effects the sacrament: in baptism, God seals the
person being baptized to God’s self, and in communion, we are brought into a
communion with Jesus Christ that is both intimate and intimate and extraordinary. In both cases, God dispenses grace through
the actions—that is why we call them means of grace.
But even though it is God dispensing the grace,
God doing the miracles, they are done through our actions, through the actions of the church, on God’s behalf. As we’ve noted before, we are the body of
Christ, God’s hands and feet on earth, and just like God heals through our
actions, just like God feeds be hungry through our actions, so God dispenses
grace through our performance of the sacraments. So I think
that in the same way, when we consecrate something—a building, an altar, a playground, even—God consecrates it
through our actions.
And you know what? Everything in this church has been consecrated, hasn’t it? Everything accumulated in its 76 years has
been set aside, dedicated to the service and worship of God. That first, famous hole in the ground? Consecrated, set aside for the service and worship of God. The sanctuary, the education building . . .
Consecrated, dedicated to the service of God.
That table over there, the pews, the silverware—all consecrated, made
sacred for the service and worship of God.
But wait . . . There’s more! We spoke of baptism earlier . . . at baptism
our lives are consecrated to God. We are
marked as God’s own. That’s how Martin
Luther could get up every morning, look at his reflection in the mirror, and
remind himself whose he was: his life had been consecrated to God.
And that applies to most of us here, doesn’t
it? We have, most of us, been baptized,
our lives set aside for the service and worship of God. All our activities, all our work, all our play . . . dedicated to the Lord.
This morning, we’re asking you to consecrate
a portion of your income specifically
to the maintenance of this church and its worship and service to the community
over the coming year. As I said before,
there’s no need to belabor why we do this, we all know about light bills and
heating bills and the like. But it is important to understand the gravity of
what we are about to do, the holiness of the act itself: making our money,
which, after all, we have given part of our lives for, making it sacred in the service of God.
So, in a few minutes, as we bring our pledges
and offerings forward, as we sing the old hymn “Take my life and let it be,
consecrated Lord to thee,” I invite you to not only consecrate your offerings,
consecrate your pledge, but
reconsecrate, rededicate your lives to the one who, through Jesus Christ,
dedicated all to us. Amen.
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